Godwin Class Annual - 1957

The Godwin class of 1957, like so many other classes, graduated
just before another major world storm broke. Not an economic event
or war as such, but one that would nevertheless produce stunning, if
not necessarily lasting, changes in US education, and just about
every facet of US technology.

Cornering its own set of German scientists and engineers after WWII,
the USSR, unlike the US, employed them immediately to help advance its rocket,
jet aircraft, and nuclear industries. Short of resources, a
large amount of German technology was underutilized by the Germans
during WWII. Given adequate resources, those technologies quickly
changed the political landscape of the world. Considered backward
by US analysts, the US paid little attention to the USSR after the
war until it detonated its own nuclear weapon in about 1949, using
to a large extent stolen plans from the US effort. In the early
1950s the USSR detonated a hydrogen weapon, and the only thing
the US could then hope is that the USSR had no effective way to
deliver the device to the US.

On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik. While now known to
have been largely a stunt, it nevertheless
changed US perceptions about the USSR instantly, and initially created
grave concern in the US about the quality of US education, and
the ability to produce the quality and quantity of scientists
and engineers that would now be needed.
German rocket scientists and engineers in the USSR had been hired
to help the USSR, which already had a tradition in rocketry dating
back to the 1930s, get up to speed with German advances made during the
war. Serge Korelev, the "Russian von Braun," largely unknown to
the West, used that help to create the R-7 rocket. Used to launch Sputnik,
it was not lost on the West that the same rocket could be used to
deliver atomic weapons to the West.

So this was the world the class of 1957 graduated into. Massive
government spending in education, the military, research of all
kinds, and the civilian spending that would go along with it, ignited
an era of unprecedented prosperity. But education would not be
the same in the US for the next 20 years or so. High school students
would be encouraged to pursue careers in science, science programs
sprang up everywhere, and rocket science became a glamorous field.
The German scientists the US had previously made just sit around for years
after the war were turned loose, and the result was the US landing
people on the moon within 12 years.

The positive changes to the world following the launch of Sputnik
were almost as dramatic as the were negative for the class of 1929
as the Great Depression widened its grip. While the class of 1957
did not benefit from the improvements in secondary education that
would follow, it certain graduated into a world with dramatically
improved opportunities. And the class was the first in a while
that graduated into a world where there were at least no major
hot wars occurring, a situation that would last for another seven
years or so. So all in all the Godwin class of 1957 had every reason
to expect to live in a prosperous land with their opportunities limited
only by their own goals and efforts.

The cover of the 1957 class annual.
Left click on the image for a larger image.

The entire 1957 class annual, made available for scanning by
by Bob Traetz, class of 1962, is presented below.
To view the pages, simply left click on the page numbers.
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in order to make some of the details easier to see. You might
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View the 1957 annual either by page number or by using thumbnail images.